I finally upgraded from my iBook G4 to one of those new shiny aluminum MacBooks last Tuesday, so over the weekend, I got to play around with the big buttonless glass trackpad. I noticed that I often used the 4-finger gestures to show all windows or the desktop but rarely used any 3-finger ones.

And even better is that both bugs have patches already reviewed or in the process of getting reviewed. The bugs were inactive for a few months, but Tom Dyas appeared out of nowhere (AFAICT) and started submitting patches with the help of Camino, Mac, DOM guys.

Earlier I took the Firefox patch and tweaked it slightly to conform better to sdwilsh style standards and added various refactoring. And now I’ve tossed those pair of patches up on the try-server so people can touch Firefox with a new set of gestures.

A quick detour for those not familiar with the multi-touch gestures.. The most basic multi-touch gesture is the 2-finger scroll which has been around for over 3 years (my iBook had it), and it lets you scroll through pages up/down/left/right/diagonally. Recently added is the 3-finger “swipe” where you place 3 fingers on the trackpad and move them in any direction like the 2-finger scroll. A couple other iPhone-inspired gestures are the “pinch” (2 fingers moving towards/away from each other) and the “twist” (2 fingers rotating).

Note! The following gestures are totally tentative and subject to change, and I’m not sure if they’ll even make it into Firefox 3.1. (From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private Apple API, so things might change at any time!) You have been warned!

Swipe Left: Go back in history [bonus! hold Cmd to open it in a tab]

Swipe Right: Go forwards in history

Swipe Up: Return to top of page

Swipe Down: End of page

Pinch Together: Zoom out

Pinch Apart: Zoom in

Twist Right: Next tab

Twist Left: Previous tab

Personally, the biggest benefit is the ease of going to the very next tab with just the touchpad. No need to use keyboard shortcuts like cmd-alt-right or fn-ctrl-down or cmd-tab#. Rotating to the right doesn’t just go to the next tab because if you keep twisting right, you’ll go to the next one and the next one. You could think of it as turning a dial to pick the tab you want. And of course, turning the dial back in the same motion switches back to the previous tab.

So if all that sounds interesting and you want to try, make sure you have one of these machines before downloading:

MacBook Pro from this year (either early-2008 model or the new late-2008 ones)

There are many developers that use other platforms such as Windows 2000/XP/Vista and various distros of Linux. Personally, I still use my Windows XP desktop for general use and testing.

Additionally, even though you might see pictures of Mozilla developers in Mountain View all using MacBooks of some sort, many of them are running virtual machines to test other platforms at the same time.

Ed: Eh, you can’t win. Linux users claim we only focus on Windows. Mac users claim we are all geeks and don’t do things the Mac way. People on Vista complain that we don’t support all the whiz-bang Vista stuff 100%. Making a multi-platform product is hard, and we’ll probably never make everyone happy all the time, but little things like this add polish and make an app feel more platform native. If your anonymous commenter actually paid attention, he’d know that our goal is to feel like a native app on all of our target platforms, and there are people working to make that happen on Windows, OS X, and Linux. Sure, it’s hard, but I think the developer time involved in maintaining separate native platform ports of the UI would be much worse, and we’d wind up even worse in platform parity. (See Google Chrome, f.e.)

Really interesting. I wish i could have enough money for a decent macbook for me.

Today i use windows vista in my pc, and i’m starting to like vista os. It’s stable, beauty and solid-rock.
Don’t get me wrong please, but visually firefox on vista is ugly. The background of the toolbar still that ugly purple-ish, and glass isn’t being used (and bug #418454 landed weeks ago).
The Glass extension is nice, but i think developers could make firefox on vista more beautiful… Win7 is going RTM between firefox 3.1 and 3.next, and yet glass hasn’t showed in firefox.

Do we really have to make this another OS flamewar? Christ, I hate the internet.

I’ve been using gestures with my firefox using Multiclutch since the day I got it. I have the exact same setup, but I turned off the zoom controls (too easy to accidently do), and made “swipe up” and “swipe down” into “open previously closed tab (command+shift+t) and “close tab” respectively.

Is it possible to make this work for Windows users that use Boot Camp? I ask because I have a MBP and I’d like to use this for both the Mac and Windows partitions of my laptop.

Apple already has drivers that enable capability for the trackpad on Windows, so given those drivers, it seems to me that it wouldn’t be impossible to make a windows version of FireFox with Multi-Touch capability.

[…] you already bought the new MacBook or MacBook Pro? There is a experimental build of Firefox now available at here. It can support the 4-finger gesture of the new glass track pad. You will be able to use 3-finger to […]

Experimental Firefox 3 tweaks with Multi-touch gesture support for new MacBook…

Edward Lee played around with a Firefox 3 patch and he managed to tweak it so that it can support the new MacBook’s Multi-touch gestures. Nobody knows if Edward’s tweaks will be included in the final Firefox 3 but you can download his Firefox 3 pat…

Interesting… but it doesn’t work on my MBP. It’s a mid-2008 MBP with Mac OS X 10.5.5 in English. I’ve tried to find the place to activate the multi-finger gestures in the Preferences panel from Minefield but it doesn’t work. Multi-finger gestures work ok on iPhoto :-/ Is there anything else that I should be enabling?
Oh, I’m using a Bluetooth mouse, maybe that’s interfering with the gesture plugin in Minefield, but after closing Minefield, turning the mouse off and opening Minefield… still not working.

[…] Fixed: 456520 – [Mac] Multi-touch gesture support for Firefox. (Using the trackpads on some newer Mac laptops, you can now swipe with three fingers to navigate through history or scroll to the top/bottom of the page. You can also pinch to zoom and twist to switch tabs. Read more on Mardak’s blog.) […]

[…] @ 5:30 pm | Author: admin Owners of MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads can try out an experimental Firefox 3.1 build that supports finger gestures—swiping left and right for back and forward, pinch zooming, and […]

[…] @ 11:00 am | Author: admin Owners of MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads can try out an experimental Firefox 3.1 build that supports finger gestures—swiping left and right for back and forward, pinch zooming, and […]

[…] support had been absent from Firefox. Experimental Firefox support for the multi-touch trackpad was first introduced in a pre-Beta build back in October by Mozilla’s Edward Lee. The changes have since made it […]

[…] support had been absent from Firefox. Experimental Firefox support for the multi-touch trackpad was first introduced in a pre-Beta build back in October by Mozilla’s Edward Lee. The changes have since made it into the […]

[…] support had been absent from Firefox. Experimental Firefox support for the multi-touch trackpad was first introduced in a pre-Beta build back in October by Mozilla’s Edward Lee. The changes have since made it into […]

[…] support had been absent from Firefox. Experimental Firefox support for the multi-touch trackpad was first introduced in a pre-Beta build back in October by Mozilla’s Edward Lee. The changes have since made it […]

[…] source? Because Edward Lee said nothing of the sort about Mozilla REing it! Here’s what he actually said: From what I quickly gathered, the gestures interface was reverse engineered from some private […]